CURIOSITIES: KID COLT OUTLAW #1 (1948)

 If you were a "Marvelite" of a certain age, and you even dipped for a little while into Marvel's line of westerns, you probably encountered the origin of Kid Colt, one of the company's oldest frontier heroes. And what you probably encountered was a four-page condensation of the origin, probably produced at a period when most of the character's adventures were of a similar length.

The "original origin," though no great classic even for the genre, has considerably more meat on its bones. On the first page, we meet Blaine Colt as he takes on a crooked deputy whipping one of the hands who works the ranch of Blaine's father. Blaine too gets whipped, in part because he wears no guns.

Slightly later, Blaine explains his reluctance to wear guns to the ranch-hand: he fears that his quick temper will cause him to take a life. But this attempt to enjoy a peaceful existence ends when Blaine is framed for the murder of his own father. The culprit is the crooked sheriff, whereas I believe the father's killer in the condensed version is just some owlhoot.

     

Blaine shoots it out with the crooked sheriff, and for good measure turns the whip of the crooked deputy on the malefactor, declaring that it's the end of crooked law in the town. However, though the origin probably doesn't explicitly come up again, Blaine's shooting of a lawman, however crooked, goes a long way toward explaining why he becomes Kid Colt, a fugitive wanted over numerous states (though this was never a consistent restriction). I'm not sure when the familiar condensed version was produced, but it seems likely that the idea of corrupt lawmen was elided to make the story more generic. Said "original origin," BTW, is credited to artist Bill Walsh and writer Ernie Hart. Hart was also a collaborator on the first ANT-MAN story to feature The Wasp, as I discussed in this post.    

  

THOUGHTS ON JIM SHOOTER

Jim Shooter passed on the last day of June this year. I won't be writing a general overview of his work, given that I only knew his Marvel and DC accomplishments, and almost nothing about his efforts for companies like Valiant. Defiant and Broadway. But I'll cover a few career highlights (and lowlights) here.

 

I'm sure almost every Shooter-obit will mention that he sold his first scripts to DC Comics, via mail, at the age of 14. Shooter became well known for improving the often staid adventures of DC's team of futuristic super-teens, the Legion of Super-Heroes, by crafting more engaging melodramatics and a greater use of action. By the middle 1960s, some long-time DC artists had started using greater dynamism in their stories, such as Gil Kane in GREEN LANTERN and Mike Sekowsky in JUSTICE LEAGUE, probably as a response to the increased popularity of Marvel's action-heavy product. But Shooter brought the sensibilities of a fan-reader to these early scripts: he wrote the sort of things that he, as a teen, liked reading. That included a greater emphasis on battle-scenarios, and even the often stodgy SUPERMAN books under editor Mort Weisinger were improved on that score. I'm sure many obits will mention that Shooter created a new recurring foe for the Man of Steel: the Parasite, who could drain off Superman's powers and then use those powers to beat the snot out of the hero. But I have a nostalgic preference for his script for SUPERMAN #191. In it, the Kryptonian must fight against DEMON, an evil cabal with fantastic weaponry, to keep the agents from obtaining a forbidden artifact. This issue might be the only time long-time Super-artist Al Plastino even came close to rendering the sort of hyperkinetic action one expects from American comic books. 

  Shooter left DC for a few years, and then came back and wrote a few more stories. But he would prove more important as an editor at Marvel, particularly when he rose to the position of the company's chief editor in 1978. All reminiscences of the period seem to agree that Shooter came into Marvel when there was something of a power vacuum, and that the company was losing a lot of money on ventures with dubious commercial potential-- some fan-favorites like the McGregor KILLRAVEN, some unlikely "throw-stuff-against-the-wall" creations like THE GOLEM and GABRIEL DEVIL HUNTER. Shooter imposed a greater editorial authority over Marvel raconteurs for the next nine years, and although he made the trains run on time, many long-time employees, among them Doug Moench, complained of micro-management that limited creativity. Back in the day, I protested the regimentation of the Shooter regime by writing a negative JOURNAL review of the 1984-85 SECRET WARS. Not that my review, or anyone else's. made any difference to the success of that maxi-series. The sweet deal that Shooter or his reps negotiated with Mattel Toys got the comic book promoted on TV alongside Mattel's SECRET WARS toy line-- and so WARS was a big hit for Shooter. (I never knew why afterward Marvel kept adapting toy lines that DIDN'T promote the comics on TV. With the exception of G.I. JOE and maybe TRANSFORMERS, most of the toy-adaptations went down the tubes.)

  Now, in those days, Shooter represented the apogee of mediocre commercial comics to the JOURNAL and its readers. I can't claim I didn't channel some of this virulent anti-Shooterism at the time, but I think I was at least aware that some creators, such as Frank Miller and Walt Simonson, produced good-to-great works under Shooter's editorial aegis. Gary Groth's take was more adversarial-- if a company wasn't producing what he deemed "great art," it was worthless. (Note how, on the JOURNAL cover above. Shooter is getting dubious looks from many characters from "alternative comics:" Rorschach, Mister X, Mister Monster, Zippy the Pinhead, and Ed the Happy Clown, for five.) By the early 1990s, the JOURNAL's devaluing of all commercial comics was so complete I for one quit submitting to the editors, since I believed that a critic had to be able to appreciate excellence in any form.       

    I don't remember finding any excellence in any of the stories Shooter wrote during his nine years at Marvel: not even the excellence of good formula comics, like LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES . However, as an editor he helped deliver the balls-to-the-wall, super-melodramatic conclusion of the "Dark Phoenix Saga " in X-MEN 137. As many fans know today, originally the X-MEN creators Claremont and Byrne had meant to deliver a fairly low-impact, cop-out (IMO) conclusion to the story. Shooter insisted that Dark Phoenix had to pay a price for succumbing to her cosmic killing-rage, and whatever one might think of imposing moral judgments on ficitonal characters, in this case Shooter's instincts were better, for that particular story, than those of Byrne and Claremont. It didn't matter to me then, and doesn't matter to me now, that Phoenix and Jean Grey would be revived many more times, in many more permutations. All that matters now was that the original story delivered a good finish to its dramatic action. Without Shooter, X-MEN fans might not have had that.

And for that accomplishment, I can even forgive SECRET WARS.

              

CURIOSITIES #44: BLACK RIDER

 This retelling of The Black Rider's origin from 1950 struck me as a little more fulsomely dramatic than the average Golden Age origin.         

 And from issue 12 in 1951, this atypical oater shows the hero defending the right of Mormons to practice their own customs in a democracy. The message is undermined a bit by the consistent misspelling, "Mormans."                                                                           

  

NEAR MYTHS: LEGION OF MONSTERS (2011)

 

One positive aspect of having retired from regular reading of Marvel Comics is that long after the comics have come out, one can pick and choose from old projects completed a decade ago and evaluate them, apart from the ongoing continuity. One such project was a revival of the concept "Legion of Monsters." The phrase was first used as an umbrella-title for one issue of a black-and-white collection of unrelated monster-stories. Then one issue of MARVEL PREMIERE in 1976 was devoted to an ad hoc teamup of four Marvel creature features-- Morbius, the Werewolf, the Man-Thing and the Ghost Rider-- though this wasn't meant to be even a pilot for an ongoing series.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Apparently such an ongoing series was conceived in 2010, resulting in a four-issue LEGION OF MONSTERS series from 2011, written by Dennis Hopeless and penciled by Juan Doe. The concept was that a variety of Marvel monsters took refuge in the Morlock tunnels beneath New York City, and a new Legion arises to protect the "Monster Metropolis," comprised of Morbius, the Werewolf By Night, the Manphibian (a gill-man introduced in the b&w LEGION magazine), and the Living Mummy. These "monster cops" (given a waggish likeness to HILL STREET BLUES, given that the first issue is titled "Hell Street Blues") have their existence threatened by a "monster virus." They receive help from a creature-slayer who would normally be their enemy, Elsa Bloodstone (intro'd back in 2001). There's no depth to this romp, but it's a fun monster mash, including short appearances of such characters as the Son of Satan, Satannish (a road company Satan), and Helleyes, an old foe from the MORBIUS feature, who doesn't even cross paths with the Living Vampire.                                                                                       

MORE MORE NAMOR

 I've been having a good conversation with Sub-Mariner fan "John" in the comments for this 2017 post, so I thought I'd dish out a few more observations on Marvel's waterlogged warrior.

One thing I didn't mention in my 2017 essay is that from time to time I go searching through the SUB-MARINER comics of the forties and fifties, looking for stories that fit my specialized category of "mythcomics." What I've found so far as mostly decent formula stories with really fine Bill Everett art. This isn't a knock against the Golden Age version of the character. Dozens of long-lived characters were better served by their art than by their plots or characterization. Everett's SUB-MARINER is in my view on the same level as Jack Cole's PLASTIC MAN; great to look at, but not that much story-wise.

Still, there were some interesting twists here and there. In issue #38 of the second SUB-MARINER series (February 1955), Everett apparently felt that other people's stories had taken his once-popular character and powered him down too much. So his solution in "The Sub-Mariner Strikes" was to "re-power" Namor with the idea of restoring his superman-status. After he's restored to his former status, the Emperor announces that he wants to launch a new war of conquest against the surface-dwellers-- a war that never gets off the ground, aside from the one task he gives Namor: to dispose of an air-breather ship. Namor ends up sparing the humans' lives, though not without regrets, since they act like assholes to him. No further suggestions of aggression by Namor's people take place in the ensuing stories, so perhaps the editors decided that they wanted Everett to confine himself to done-in-one tales.

Then in issue #40-- three issues away from the title's cancellation-- Everett wrote and drew "The Sub-Mariner and the Icebergs," a tale which might have provided some tropes that Stan Lee used in his 1960s revision of Namor's origin.

An American fleet of ships intrudes upon the arctic oceans where Namor's sub-mariners live. Namor immediately believes the flotilla is an invasion force and uses his people's tech to surround the ships with icebergs. In self-defense the ships' leader orders the icebergs dynamited, which causes some destruction of the sea-dwellers' nearby city-- which recalls the mission of Captain McKenzie in the Marvel Origin. Everett then has the Emperor send Namora to sabotage the ships, which resembles the way Namor's mother Princess Fen infiltrates McKenzie's ship with some idea of spying on the humans. (How she was going to spy with her blue skin hanging out was never explained.) 

Namora is captured and held hostage, which forces Namor to talk turkey with the captain of the flotilla. He claims to be the head of a scientific expedition looking for uranium-- and though this isn't necessarily a venture without ANY military applications, it proves true that the humans aren't intentionally encroaching on the sub-mariners. 

Namor accepts the humans' pledge of peace, but his evil cousin Byrrah tries to re-incite hostilities. However, before he can do so, the humans inform Namor that his own interference with the icebergs has triggered an unstoppable seismic reaction that will destroy the sub-mariners' city. Over Byrrah's protests, Namor evacuates his people-- and sure enough, the city is destroyed by a seaquake. The story ends with a plea for peace and a touch of tragedy as the subsea people seek to rebuild "their shattered empire." In FANTASTIC FOUR #4, Stan Lee may have remembered "Icebergs" when he had Atlantis destroyed by nuclear tests and its people scattered, though only a few more Sub-Mariner stories transpired before Namor was reunited with his people once again.

SELLING THE SUPERHERO WOMEN

 

I started to respond to Tom Brevoort's post on Marvel's 1977 reprint collection THE SUPERHERO WOMEN, and to its attendant comments on that blog. But I decided I would do so here first, and reprint my remarks there afterward. 

______

First, I agree with Tom that the selection from SPIDER-MAN #62 doesn't really make the character of Medusa look all that great. Of course, there was no inherent sexism in this guest-starring story, because Stan Lee had written other Spidey stories in which male guest-stars like Quicksilver or The Iceman acted stupidly in order to make the story work. A better selection would have been Medusa's solo story from MARVEL SUPER HEROES, published around the same time as the Spidey story, which in turn may've been designed to get casual readers interested in the long-locked lass.

The RED SONJA story is an okay selection, and the FANTASTIC FOUR entry is well chosen. This story depicted Sue Storm gaining her force field powers, thus responding, after roughly three years, to fans' complaints about her lack of overall power. 

I have the impression that the MS MARVEL selection arose from the company's ongoing agenda to protect the "Marvel" name in any character. Certainly that agenda underlay the creation of the "Marvel Captain Marvel" in the first place, and since a CBR article mentions that the company was taking pitches for various "Ms. Marvel" concepts as early as 1972-- two years after UNCANNY X-MEN and Marvel Girl were off the stands-- that applied to the final, approved version as well. (I couldn't locate an online recapitulation of the story that Jean Grey herself was considered as a possible "Ms. Marvel.")

The selection of the two-part THOR story featuring Hela was a strange one. Since she wasn't purely villainous, she wasn't all that consequential to THOR in particular or to Marvel as a whole. Why not the first Enchantress story, since she was at least important to the universe, and since the tale was a good stand-alone? Maybe Stan just wanted to spotlight some of his post-Kirby work with the God of Thunder, which work was actually pretty good. I'm not surprised there was no Sif-centric story, because I can't think of any at all up to 1977.

A better choice IMO would have been issues X-MEN #62-63. Granted, Marvel Girl was usually a pretty weak sister for most of the feature's run, but this was one of the few times, if not the only time, she was allowed to shine and save the day. And until re-reading the issue, I'd forgot that it included Magneto hitting on Jean Grey big-time, in the old "reign at my side" context. So, Mags, checking out the Young Talent? Sort of like that story where Magneto has the mentally enslaved Scarlet Witch do a hootchie-koo dance for him, years before she was retconned into his pride and joy.

The "Femizons" story was meh, and I suppose the CAT and SHANNA stories were attempts by Stan to repeat his "Well, we tried" defense. The Black Widow story from SPIDER-MAN is another story where the guest star acts stupidly to make the story work, but it holds some historical interest for debuting the bitchin' catsuit-costume. 

That leaves only the Wasp's debut story in the ANT-MAN feature from 1963, which is IMO the best story in the collection. Though Stan's only credited with the plot for "The Creature from Kosmos," I'd theorize that he gave scripter Ernie Hart a pretty thorough breakdown of the whole story, since Stan was after all doing his best to build his then-small universe. For an early Silver Age adventure, it's pretty layered. Ant-Man starts having existential doubts about who will carry on for him while simultaneously grieving for his lost wife Maria. When he considers the possibility of a partner, 1963 readers might have expected (if not for the cover and splash page) the introduction of a kid sidekick-- "Pismire, the Ant Wonder!" Instead Henry Pym gets a meet-cute with Jan Van Dyne, a young woman who slightly resembles Maria, and thought balloons establish that both are instantly attracted to one another. Despite Pym's defensive reaction to the effect that Jan is just "a child," I think it's obvious that she's close to 20, and probably a bit older, given that there's no question of her inheriting the Van Dyne fortune when her pop gets killed. None of that Magneto-type trolling for Old Henry!

I also don't think there's a good argument for Jan, before or after she becomes The Wasp, being an "airhead." Her determination to avenge her dad is what leads Pym to play "Batman" to her "Robin," and to give her the chance not just for vengeance, but to take up the life of a superhero. But she accepts the duty partly because she knows that he's attracted to her, and not as a kid. So all of her subsequent expressions of stereotypical femininity-- drooling over other men, or her frequent references to shopping-- are part of her plan to stay close to Henry and keep reminding him that she's a woman, not a sidekick. And of course, she may actually LIKE shopping. I have it on good authority that some women really do!

CRISES AND CONTINGENCIES

 Though I don't follow any regular serials from "the Big Two," the TPB market makes it quite evident that both companies remain as heavily invested in "multi-feature crossovers" in 2024 as they were in 1986, when such rival serials as SECRET WARS and CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS duked it out for sales supremacy. In fact, because "multi-feature crossovers" is an unwieldy mouthful, I'm considering a new term,"clusterfubars." The whole purpose of most crisis-events since 1986 has been to fuck up the status quo beyond all recognition, even if the original status quo later reasserts itself or is replaced by some other manageable state of affairs.

I have not written a great deal about clusterfubars here, though the most involved essay is probably 2008's EARTH SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE. I argued that the commercial comics-medium's penchant for "earth shattering changes" was nothing new. In fact, though I didn't explore the topic in a more systematic manner, I quoted anthropologist Lee Drummond on the subject of crises in fiction, be they in myth or in popular fiction:

...the figures of myth do not live solely by virtue of the operation of a collection of sentences woven into a 'plot'... The critical thing about the doings of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, R2D2, C3PO, and the rest is the elemental level of crisis-- identity crisis-- that lies right at or just beneath the surface of their actions: Will the Force or its Dark Side triumph? Will R2D2 survive? Will Luke discover the awful truth of his paternity?

Before examining the applicability of "crises" to myth and fiction generally, though, I would be remiss not to define what would be the opposite of "crisis narratives" (especially after one of my recent essays  faulted Joseph Campbell for not providing counter-examples to a proposed term).

I duly looked up antonyms for the word "crisis," and was surprised to find "contingency" listed as a SYNONYM for the word. Every connotation in which I've heard the two words suggests the opposite. A crisis is some event that few if any participants can foresee or avoid. A contingency is some event with which forethought can cope, at least up to a point. The application of each term may also depend on a given subject's span of knowledge. For the majority of persons around the globe, the appearance of the Covid virus was a crisis. For Anthony Fauci, who coordinated the use of gain-of-function research with the Chinese lab in Wuhan, the virus' appearance would have been a contingency, something he could anticipate happening if things went south.

Drummond is broadly correct that a lot of fiction of all genres and mediums depends on "crisis narratives." The theatergoer who views OEDIPUS REX learns nothing about the day-to-day life of King Oedipus or his family. Everything in that play and its sequels is defined by an unforeseeable crisis. And comedies are no different from tragedies in a structural sense. The AMPHITRYON of Plautus centers upon the merry mix-up that ensues when the title character returns from the wars, and must be prevented from finding out that the supreme god Jupiter is schtupping Amphitryon's wife, at least until Jupiter successfully impregnates the woman with Hercules.

But what would be a "contingency narrative," which is to say, a narrative whose conflict does not hinge upon some larger-than-life crisis? There are some archaic examples of such narratives in theater and in folklore, but it's correct to stress that contingency narratives really took off with the rise of naturalistic literature, particularly in 18th century Europe. I deem Daniel Defoe's two best-known works, ROBINSON CRUSOE and MOLL FLANDERS, to be novels built around a constant flow of contingencies relating to what the main characters must do to survive and/or prosper.

And since I'm primarily concerned with the medium of comic books, where do contingency narratives appear in the history of comics? Even most of the celebrated comics-stories, as agreed-upon by elitist critics, depend largely on types of crisis, even when they may be predicated on such low-level "crises" as mistaken identity (which is a not infrequent "gotcha" in a lot of one-shot horror stories). Teen comedies like ARCHIE are probably the least "crisis-like," being usually predicated on simple formula situations that the thoughtless protagonist fails to foresee (Archie makes a date with two girls on the same night; they find out and beat him up or the like.) Most such stories are one-shots, too. Some continuing comic strips, such as GASOLINE ALLEY, presented an ensemble of characters having low-wattage adventures without any dire consequences. The first superhero to regularly exploit both narrative forms was the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, who would support himself and his ailing aunt with money (contingency) made from photographing his own heroic actions (crisis), quelling the rampages of Doctor Octopus or The Lizard.

At some point in the eighties, many superhero fans-- those that dominantly embraced the superhero genre above all other genres-- clamored for low-wattage incidents in the lives of the characters they liked. These pleas brought forth various "day in the life" contingency narratives. Arguably, in subsequent decades, this fannish preference increased the frequency of other stories in which slow-paced drama took the place of fast-paced adventure. However, the same decade, as noted above, also cemented the new business model of the clusterfubar. The Big Two sought to monetize crises by having them affect numerous features at the same time, on the theory that interested readers would purchase titles they didn't normally buy in order to keep apprised of all segments of the extended crisis narrative. I have no idea as to how well this practice works as an overall sales strategy, but it's been in place for about forty years, so someone must be making money from it.

Single features like the venerable SPIDER-MAN appear to be far more guided by crisis narratives overall, rather than by a balance of both narratives. Features with large character-ensembles-- X-MEN, TEEN TITANS-- are even more awash in constant fervid crisis narratives, so that what used to be called "soap opera" is more like "disaster opera." 

More observations on this theme to come later, possibly.

MYTHCOMICS: "DON'T DO THAT VOODOO YOU DO SO WELL" (MSH SPRING SPECIAL #1, 1990)

A few years back I played around with using "Black History Month" as a theme for February, though I was pretty loose in my criteria, often mixing racial myths as I pleased. I wasn't really thinking about following the theme this year, but I chanced upon a one-shot story in one of Marvel's many inventory-filled publications, which is like finding the proverbial diamond in the garbage.

And it seems even more improbable, given that the star of this story is Brother Voodoo. This Haitian hero was launched by Marvel in 1973 around the same time as a similarly-themed title, TALES OF THE ZOMBIE, both of which showed a peculiar obsession Marvel Editorial formed at the time for the linked subjects of voodoo and zombies. Neither feature was successful, and in fan-circles Brother Voodoo has often seen as a lame character, particularly thanks to humor-artist Fred Hembeck. I don't recall if Hembeck's mockeries of the hero predate or postdate this 1990 story, in which he himself adopted a more "straight" style to illustrate this one-off tale with writer Scott Lobdell. Absent further information, I will assume that Lobdell submitted this VOODOO script in his tryout period, and that it was assigned to Hembeck after the fact.

Intentionally or not, VOODOO utilizes a trope I think appeared with some frequency in Chris Claremont's work of the seventies and eighties; a trope I'll call "good man gives in to bad desires." Despite the story's punny title it's entirely serious in tone, and one reason I may like it is because the original hero in his short-lived seventies series was so good as to be thoroughly bland.

The hero narrates his own story, and his first line foregrounds his fallibility: "It was never my intention to become Brother Voodoo." In the course of the narrative he references the basics of his origin. Born Jericho Drumm of Haiti, he studied psychology in the U.S. but returned to his native land to support his brother Daniel. Daniel, a priest of voodoo, was slain by a rival, and Jericho mastered the Haitian mystic arts in order to avenge him. His most notable power was that Jericho had somehow merged with the spirit of his dead brother, and could send Daniel Drumm's spirit into the bodies of enemies, possessing them to do Jericho's will a la the DC hero Deadman. FWIW, the Daniel-spirit never seems to have any personality, as if it was just a raw magical force instead of the ghost of a once living human.

On the second page Jericho, who has said that "voodoo is all about belief," illustrates this credo by rescuing a boat on a storm-swept sea, seeming to become a giant, though this may be only in the minds of those being rescued. The reader meets Jericho's girlfriend Loralee Tate, a nurse seeking to cure an immunological crisis among the Haitian people. She mentions that she's glad she didn't leave for the States as she planned earlier, but Jericho's guilty thoughts make clear that he had something to do with both her change of mind and the medical crisis. 

Page four sets down the cause of that guilt. Upon being informed of Loralee's plan to go home, he confesses, "I was afraid of losing her, so I used my brother's spirit to possess her, to insure our love-- to destroy our love." Though the script does not specify everything that followed, it's logical to presume that Jericho had sex with Loralee while she was under his control, or he wouldn't be nearly this guilty. The caption about his having "removed the lie" proves confusing, given that she still seems to be under his mental dominion back on page 2.

In any case, precisely because of Jericho's bond with nature through his voodoo mastery, the nature spirits of Haiti have brought about the immunological breakdown. He pleads with the spirits for forgiveness, but they only state that "forgiveness must come from you, and one other."

 Due to the limited page count, Lobdell doesn't actually show the Haitian people being freed from the "penance" inflicted upon them by Jericho's sinful misuse of his power. Since on page seven Loralee is shown leaving Haiti as she originally planned, the most logical conclusion is that Jericho finally released her from his thrall, and that she realized what he had done. Loralee echoes Jericho's own intuition that his sin was a failure of belief in their love, strongly implying that because of this sin, he's lost out on any chance with her. She's clearly the "one other" that the spirits say must forgive him, and page eight wraps up with Jericho realizing that he must at least conditionally forgive himself in order to do better, to become the hero he meant to be.

I've seen only one online commentary on the story. Predictably enough, the speaker seemed to think that Lobdell was indulging in a rape-fantasy via mind-manipulation. But literary rape-fantasies are usually predicated on the enjoyment of superior power, and they don't show the rapists wallowing in guilt for what they've done. (Jack Hill's 1966 MONDO KEYHOLE provides a good shorthand example.) Current gender politics imply that a male can never transgress against a female without deserving eternal perdition, while female transgressions against males are not even conceptually possible. All I can say is that I think the ethic of forgiveness applies to this particular fictional situation, and for situations taking place in real life, each one must be evaluated individually as well. 

A last point on the subject of Forgotten Continuity: though the "Haitian plague" is original to Lobdell's story, Loralee Tate did debut in the last three BROTHER VOODOO stories-- where she was still a registered nurse, but was also Black, unlike the one in Lobdell's VOODOO. Black Loralee may have been intended as a potential romantic partner for Jericho, but if so there are no indications in her only appearances. White Loralee, possibly occupying one of those many "alternate Marvel Earths," does not seem to have appeared again. And that's probably for the best given the ideological climate at the current Marvel Comics.

BTW, I belatedly found a page where Hembeck explained his involvement in the "Brother Voodoo is So Lame" schtick, which he admits that he continued but did not originate.

http://www.hembeck.com/More/Voodog/Why.htm

ADDENDUM TO SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 

In the preceding essay, I forgot that AMAZING ADVENTURES wasn't just dropped, but that it was converted into Stan Lee's experimental all-Ditko book AMAZING ADULT FANTASY, which in its final-issue form (with the "adult" ironically knocked from the title) had at least as much consequence for Marvel as FANTASTIC FOUR #1. I'm sure I read of the title changeover many times but it just got filed in the "not significant" pile of memory engrams.

The switch from AA to AAF is also more significant than I'd thought, now that I've read all the AA issues online. Though there's some Ditko mixed in to AA, the six issues are heavily Kirby-dominated. Kirby's SF/monster books had evidently been selling OK for Atlas/Marvel even during DC's big superhero push around 1958. But AA must not have sold well, possibly indicating a sea-change in reader preferences. (It would take a little longer for all of DC's SF-anthology titles to become saturated with continuing-character features.) So the transition to AAF shows Stan Lee trying to aim a little higher than the usual Atlas/Marvel fare, building up Steve Ditko's aesthetic. I've never seen any commentary on AAF by either Lee or Ditko, so I have to accept the reigning fan-theory, that Lee hoped to emulate the model of TV's successful TWILIGHT ZONE anthology. I doubt he was counting on that as a long-term strategy for success, given the fate of EC Comics about six years previous; he probably just hoped for decent sales while enjoying seeing his stories brought to life by Ditko's burgeoning talent.

Most of the Kirby stuff in AA is pretty ordinary fare, by the way. I need to do a writeup of the "Doctor Droom" stories some time, because they definitely don't feel like "New Marvel."

NEAR-MYTHS: " PARTS OF THE HOLE," (DAREDEVIL V. 2, #9-15, 2011)

I only reread the introductory sequence for the Marvel character Echo because of the MCU teleseries, to re-familiarize myself with the template.

Back in the day I bought some odd issues of the original sequence, but wasn't exactly inspired to follow the whole story. Some of Joe Quesada's art was nice, but the concept-- principally executed by Quesada and KABUKI writer-artist David Mack, with some fill-in assists from two other raconteurs-- seemed too much like a superficial effort to introduce an "Elektra Lite." Echo, a deaf woman of Cheyenne ancestry, possesses what I guess is a mutant ability to instantly emulate any fighting-skill she sees, combining aspects of Marvel's villain Taskmaster and the autistic heroine "Zen" from the 2008 CHOCOLATE.

Mack and Quesada fill their seven-issue tale with lots of bizarre, Sienkiewicz-style imagery (probably inspired by the example of ELEKTRA ASSASSIN) and lots of decompression-style, pseudo-literary voyages into the heads of Matt "Daredevil" Murdock, Echo, and Kingpin, the nasty villain who sets a potential heroine against a real hero. It doesn't help Echo's reputation that Kingpin gulls the young woman-- to whom Kingpin's been something of a surrogate father-- by giving her doctored evidence that the Man of Fear killed her birth-parent. What, Echo just accepts one piece of evidence as to the hero's turpitude, and seems blithely unaware of Daredevil's numerous years of crimefighting? And, from what Mack and Quesada tell readers, she doesn't even need Kingpin to give her a compelling reason as to why a costumed hero would slay Echo's father-- though Kingpin himself was in partnership with said individual. For me, I downgrade this arc not just because Mack and Quesada indulge in this hoary "frame the hero" trope, but because they're so bad at it.

Echo's tragic past and her various musings are just as tedious and derivative as her motivation for fighting the hero, and her Native American heritage is tossed off in some jejune gibberish about learning "the devil's medicine." Given that Echo is a sexy femme fatale, she soon becomes another love-interest for the main character. However, unlike Elektra, Echo doesn't know Daredevil's civilian ID (though Kingpin does, and curiously neglects to tender that intelligence). So she ends up dating lawyer Matt, and they have some long "date-cute" interactions, though these too seem very dependent on a lot of "blind dating the deaf" tropes. Then, at first opportunity she dons a sexy outfit and gets into fights with the sightless crusader.

The fights are decent, though nothing that would ever make Frank Miller look over his shoulder. But in keeping with the fashionable decompression approach, any tension generated by the action is dispersed by loads and loads of banal wool-gathering in the heads of Murdock and Kingpin about their early years-- all of which had been done better by previous raconteurs on the title. "Hole" takes place shortly after Murdock's first great love Karen Page has died-- not sure if it was for the first time or not-- but the only good thing that comes of this touch is a weird but rather funny joke about how masturbation leads to blindness. And speaking of blindness, Echo does get the chance to take an ironic revenge upon her "bad father," so at least Mack and Quesada provided that much resolution before the character became absorbed into the Marvel continuum.

I also re-visited this introductory arc due to my interest in Native American figures in pop culture. I suspect, given the way the MCU distorts most of its adaptation-material, that reading the arc won't really yield much insight into the streaming show. But such are the sacrifices I make.

CLAW CONSIDERATIONS

 On THE TOM BREVOORT EXPERIENCE, the question was raised as to why Atlas Comics had published four issues of THE YELLOW CLAW in 1956, and whether it was a response to the same-year appearance of a syndicated teleseries, THE ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU. My response follows.

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Since Martin Goodman was far more known for jumping on trends than was Stan Lee, I would concur that YELLOW CLAW probably had its genesis from Goodman hearing news about the syndicated series ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU. In fact, since the cover date for YELLOW CLAW #1 was October 1956, that issue probably hit stands at least two months before the first episode of ADVENTURES aired in September ’56. The comic book outlasted the series (not counting reruns), published into early 1957 some time after ADVENTURES broadcast its last new episode back in November.

Now, what might have boosted the Fu Manchu TV show? One short novelette with Fu Manchu had been published in 1952– I don’t recall where– but it didn’t see book publication in Rohmer’s lifetime, only getting collected by Daw in 1973 with three ultra-short uncollected Fu stories in WRATH OF FU MANCHU. For most readers, Fu’s last novel had been in 1947 or 1948, and the next to last full novel would show up one year after the series appeared, in 1957– UNLESS that novel got serialized in periodical form somewhere first. A lot of Fu novels were serialized before book publication, but I’ve no evidence that happened with the 1957 novel. Still, the news of a new novel with the devil-doctor might have sparked the TV show, though, as with the comic, it’s hard to coat-tail on a phenomenon if your imitation comes out FIRST.

Addendum: The Page of Fu Manchu reports that the 1957 novel had no serialization.

There might have been an uptick in Asian villains in pop media of the early fifties thanks to the Korean War, but I’m not aware of any major influential challengers to the legacy of the devil doctor– EXCEPT for Sax Rohmer’s second best known character, Sumuru. She had first appeared in a late forties radio serial, but according to one online review, Rohmer’s five novelizations of the character’s exploits did very well for paperback publisher Gold Medal in the early fifties:

Sax Rohmer’s Nude in Mink (released as Sins of Sumuru in the UK) was published in May 1950. It was Gold Medal’s seventh overall title, and their third fiction novel. Like the Fu Manchu series, it featured a series villain, Sumuru, that was molded to be a female version of her male predecessor. In the first two months, Nude in Mink went through three printings—at 200,000 copies per print run (assuming it followed Gold Medal’s usual publishing pattern), that means 600,000 copies in just 60 days. According to The Page of Fu Manchu, it would go through another printing in October 1950, followed by a fifth printing in October 1951 and then a sixth in July 1953. Not bad for a novel that was salvaged from a BBC radio serial from 1945–1946. It would also spawn several sequels: Sumuru (1951), The Fire Goddess (1952), Return of Sumuru (1954), and Sinister Madonna (1956)

http://www.pulp-serenade.com/2020/08/nude-in-mink-by-sax-rohmer-1950.html

I don’t know exactly how “Asian” Sumuru is since I’ve read only one of the novels, but her success might have sparked Rohmer to execute his last few Fu-stories, and that might have convinced TV producers that there was gold in them thar Asian mastermind hills. And of course in the mid to late fifties, syndicated TV was coming out with a lot of pulpy adaptations– Sheena, Jungle Jim, Flash Gordon– so Fu Manchu fit into that overall spirit of pulp-revival.

THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION

For once, I got permission from a forum-poster, one DoctorHermes428, to reprint here a post from CHFB that sparked my current essay. The conversation involved in part talking about the reasons why in the late 1960s Jack Kirby declined to accept any offer Stan Lee may have made re: taking over Lee's de facto Art Director duties for Marvel Comics, and why he Kirby decided instead to sever relations with Marvel in 1969 and go to work for DC Comics under head editor Carmine Infantino.

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I don't see how Jack Kirby would have enjoyed being Art Director, no matter if it paid better. He loved working on his own, sitting up all night over the drawing board. Being in an office with people coming in and out all day, the phone ringing, arguments over a cover layout... all this would have annoyed him beyond bearing (as I see it).
What happened at DC really broke Jack Kirby's heart. His grand plans for the Fourth World books where he had some of his favorite creators working for him, as well as his ideas for a line of black and white magazines, weren't supported by DC (mostly Carmine Infantino). 

I don't think Kirby was ever the same after this. He still turned out some fine comics but increasingly he was jus going through the motions. The spark had been damped. He wasn't out to change the world or create his life's work, he just settled down to make a living. I know most people will say, "It's just comic books, what's the big deal?" but to me it's one of the biggest missed opportunities in pop culture ever. -- DoctorHermes428.

Now in my essay STAN, JACK, AND JOE STUFF I mentioned in a general sense the way the Marvel Universe had in essence undermined Kirby's independent way of doing comics, though I didn't address any long-term creative consequences. I wrote:

From my outsider's standpoint, though, the synergy between Kirby and Lee was far different [from the Simon-Kirby collaboration], and I think Kirby got from Lee as good as he gave. But Kirby had spent a long, long time spinning his fantasies on the drawing-board, and he probably wasn't all that sensitive to the ways in which Lee MAY have turned him in new directions. Years later, when Kirby was seeking to reclaim his original art from the recalcitrant Marvel Comics, the artist said many dismissive things about Stan's talents, and some fans have taken those pronouncements as gospel. To me, the obvious fact that Kirby's later solo productions abjured the "soap opera" approach of Marvel proves to me that Kirby did not originate this approach to characterization, despite the fact that together Kirby and Lee could do soap-opera tropes better than anyone else in the business.

Kirby, unlike most professionals in his time, had an incredible capacity to remember and rework dozens of story-tropes from dozens of genres, so that much of his work, alone or in collaboration, seems like raw creativity unleashed. But he didn't always know the best way to channel his own creativity, precisely because he was so many-faceted. In addition, that creativity insured that he could never be entirely comfortable just cranking out stories for a client like DC Comics, and even if he didn't especially want to return to Marvel in the late 1950s, the ways in which his talent responded to Stan Lee's innovations re-defined the superhero genre at a time when the comic-book medium lay on the edge of extinction. Without the intense fandom that arose from Marvel Comics, it's possible that few readers would even care these days about sorting out who did what, and why.

 First, I should enlarge on what I said about "new directions." 

I've the impression that both Lee and Kirby read widely in many pulp genres as young men, and that, unlike many of their contemporaries, they were able, whether with one another or with other collaborators, to convey that enthusiasm to their young reading-audience. And of all the genres they both absorbed, the most important one to their 1960s collaborations was the genre of science fiction.

Now, the prose pulps of the 1940s would have offered a rather schizophrenic view of the genre, for one could encounter on the stands both pure "gosh-wow" space operas like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Captain Future alongside and deeper, more thoughtful philosophical meditations by authors like Asimov and Heinlein. So far as I can tell, though, almost no comics raconteurs of the 1940s tapped into the philosophical side of SF. All, including Lee and Kirby, were totally invested in "gosh-wow." And I will extend that argument (for reasons that will soon become clear) to the employment of SF in American cinema. In the decade of the 1940s, nearly no "philosophy-SF" was attempted, and the few attempts hardly came close to touching the hem of Fritz Lang's trouser-leg.

But comic book SF took on its own schizophrenic division in the very early 1950s. Going by my partial reading of the early issues of DC's flagship  SF-anthology comic, STRANGE ADVENTURES (1950), I would say that DC remained steadfastly committed to the "gosh-wow" method. In the same year that ADVENTURES debuted, William Gaines' EC Comics published its two SF-titles, WEIRD FANTASY and WEIRD SCIENCE. EC experts would know more than I of Gaines' reading-proclivities. But for whatever reasons-- which probably include the proclivities of contributors like Wally Wood-- EC's two magazines proved to be more in the spirit of "philosophy-SF" that had been best propagated in the forties by ASTOUNDING MAGAZINE and in the fifties by THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (said magazine having begun in 1949). To further support the sense of a changing ethos, American cinema suddenly began investing heavily in "thinking-man's SF," with DESTINATION MOON in 1950 and both THE THING and THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL in 1951. 

I can't say at present how much the changes to comics-SF and movie-SF affected either Lee or Kirby in the first half of the fifties. I don't think by that time either man was likely to be reading pulp magazines any more, whether the magazines were simple or sophisticated. But I have the distinct impression that both of them kept a weather-eye on the new breed of SF-movies, and that both men began emulating cinema's version of "philosophical SF" in their comic books, and MAYBE imitating EC's efforts in that department too. How much these emulations affected their work in the early 1950s is not important to my thesis. But it seems without question that when they started collaborating on SF-work in the late 1950s-- even on the works where Stan's brother Larry Leiber provided the dialogue-- they began giving the characters in their short-term anthology-tales more characterization than anything one could see in DC's gosh-wow stories of the decade.

The DC gosh-wow dynamic also informed the company's SF-heavy superheroes of the late fifties and early sixties: FLASH, GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE. But when Lee enlisted Kirby to collaborate on their flagship superhero title in 1961, the first thing they did was to work in one of the tragic monsters they'd been using in their SF-anthology tales, but as an ongoing hero. 

Though Lee and Kirby were very different individuals and had very different attitudes toward their creative endeavors, I think the synergy between them came from a common understanding that you could tell far more engaging comics-stories if the characters were at least on the same level of a movie like 1953's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. From the years 1961-1964, that's as far as their aspirations went.

Then, during the years 1965 through 1967, Kirby goes through a period of incredible dynamism in terms of designing new characters. In FANTASTIC FOUR alone, he visualized the Inhumans, Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the Kree, and the Black Panther in that short period. It's possible, as Kirby apologists believe, that Lee simply let Kirby create everything during that period and just filled in the dialogue. But there's no literal proof that Kirby never picked up any ideas from his editor and collaborator. One can only say that Lee probably could not have designed a character to save his life. That said, before Kirby wasted time coming up with a design for comics' first Black superhero, I think it's axiomatic that Lee would have signed off on spotlighting such a character. Indulging some of Kirby's wilder flights of fancy didn't mean letting the artist do whatever he pleased. Lee was the editor, the guy who made decisions about what did or didn't benefit the image of the company he was building into a small empire. So if Lee had wanted to turn King T'Challa into just another White jungle-hero, that's what Kirby would have been obliged to draw.

As DoctorHermes says, in the late sixties Kirby saw that for the first time his works were getting a little serious attention from the non-comics world. He didn't think, probably correctly, that he was getting due credit for his contributions-- though to be fair, outsiders would not have cared about the specifics of who created what. As I said in my earlier essay, only hardcore fans kept track of such minutiae. For the last two years of his second Marvel tenure, Kirby reined in his creative impulses, probably to keep from giving away any more profitable ideas to the company. One anecdote suggests that Kirby might have shown Stan Lee a few rough ideas he'd later take to DC Comics. When some interviewer related this anecdote to Stan Lee, the Marvel editor typically said that he didn't remember one way or the other.

Ironically, one of the models for Kirby's "Fourth World" was not a major SF-author, but the foremost fantasy-author of the sixties decade, J.R.R. Tolkien. To be sure, the only thing Kirby really took from Tolkien was a general metaphysical attitude toward the struggle between the Good of New Genesis and the Evil of Apokolips, a theme not present in most SF prose works. But almost all of the imagery of the Fourth World stemmed from science fiction, not fantasy. 

What Kirby presented in the Fourth World was usually "gosh-wow" SF garnished with occasional philosophical content. Nevertheless, the scripts he wrote were fully as ambitious as those he co-created with Lee. I think it's likely that, aside from just wanting to be independent of his collaboration with Lee, Kirby hoped to establish his Fourth World as an artistic rival to the Marvel Universe he'd helped build.

I like many fans wish that Carmine Infantino had allowed the Fourth World story to come to a decent conclusion. But even given such circumstances, I don't think Kirby-at-DC had a chance in hell of challenging the popularity of Marvel. I hypothesize that in the early years, both Lee and Kirby probably enjoyed, as much as any professional adults could, the fannish pleasure of having two heroes from different features clash. At least I can't look at the 1964 "The Hulk vs the Thing" and see anything but two creators having fun, rather than just hacking out a job for pay. But when Kirby went to DC, the only way he could prosper at that company-- where various characters were parceled out into separate feifdoms-- was to keep his creations isolated from everything in mainstream DC, apart from some minor usages of Superman, Jimmy Olsen, and new incarnations of the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion. 

By 1970, though, the DC approach of keeping their features largely isolated from one another was beginning to lose favor with the hardcore fan audience. Those fans were a minor subgroup of the general audience, of course. But the casual comics-readers weren't ready to commit to Kirby's big project. Could the hardcore fans have made the Fourth World profitable enough to keep it going a little longer? No one can possibly know. All we know is that comics fandom of the early 1970s was divided on the merits of the New Kirby Universe. I've seen a fair number of fans reminisce that they just couldn't get into Kirby's rather eccentric scripts, and that may be because they'd become accustomed to the greater quality control seen at Marvel under Lee's editorship. I'm fairly sure that Don Thompson expressed contempt for the Kirbyverse in his fanzine NEWFANGLES, just a year or two before he and wife Maggie began writing for the tradezine THE BUYER'S GUIDE.

I concur that after the premature cancellation of the Fourth World books, Kirby never again sought to equal the incredible creativity of either that creative era or of the 1965-67 period. Some particular ideas are very good; some are pretty bad. As for mainstream comics after Marvel's classic period, I don't see a lot of writers and artists seeking inspiration from either prose or cinematic SF with the intensity that I discern in the works of Lee and Kirby. More often, I saw the tendency to rework tropes from the Lee-Kirby days, or from standout SF-comics of the sixties, like the Fox-Infantino ADAM STRANGE. (Chris Claremont riffing on the ALIEN movies is not my idea of a meaningful SF-influence.) Kirby's creative decline mirrored the demise of both gosh-wow SF and philosophical-SF in the comics medium so far as I can see, as Lee's linking of superheroes and soap-opera melodrama (which merits separate discussion) took precedence. 

And that's as good a place as any to end these somewhat doleful meditations.

NULL-MYTHS: "VENGEANCE! CRIES THE VALKYRIE" (DEFENDERS #108-109, 1982)

The "cry" of the title is more like a whimper, given the long history of Marvel's Valkyrie character. When I analyzed Dave Kraft's DEFENDERS story "Valhalla Can Wait," I noted that I'd started off this blog by surveying most of the early stories that established the history of the heroine. One of the things that intrigued me about the character is that, being produced at seventies Marvel, she wasn't created in the same manner as the Hulk or Spider-Man, who began in stand-alone serials devoted to their exploits. Instead, Valkyrie started as a tabula rasa character, an Asgardian powerhouse who, at first, seemed to be no more than a fantasy-creation of the evil Enchantress. Further, both she and her mortal "identity" were loosely intertwined with various prominent Marvel heroes (like the Black Knight and Doctor Strange) to menaces (the Nameless One and the Celestials) in a way that was not characteristic of heroes invented for the sixties, when there existed no overriding Marvel continuity-mythos. 

In DEFENDERS #4 Steve Englehart grafted the persona of the Valkyrie upon the madwoman Barbara Norris (who had been introduced in an unrelated HULK story). But though Englehart  established that the mortal Barbara still shared the body with the Asgardian being, he did nothing more with the history of Barbara. Steve Gerber began exploring Barbara's past in order to give more human context to the heroine, particularly by having the warrior-woman interact with Barbara's mortal husband Jack-- though Barbara's spirit during this time remained quiescent, effectively out of the picture. Once Gerber left, subsequent DEFENDERS writers largely wrote Jack out of the series. 

"Valhalla" suggests that Kraft toyed with the idea of writing Barbara Norris out of the Valkyrie mythos. His was the first tale to suggest that Valkyrie had never been a creation of her sorcerous mistress; that she had an identity in Asgard: Brunhilde, leader of the Valkyrior who gathered slain souls for Valhalla. Brunhilde's original body still existed in Asgard, and a scheming Asgardian deity caused the current Valkurie to come in contact with the comatose Brunhilde form, causing the soul of Barbara Norris to exit what had technically been her own body and entering that of Brunhild. By the adventure's end Mad Barbara in Brunhilde's body ended up going to the Asgardian hell, and Brunhilde's consciousness totally controlled the transformed Barbara-body.

I commented that Kraft's story possessed mythic potential but was very rushed, But at least it was a story, and not a farrago stuffed with continuity points, like Marc de Matteis' 'Vengeance." 

DeMatteis passes lightly over the Kraft story and begins his story by having Valkyrie's mortal body slain. Though the Enchantress had nothing to do with the murder, she conveniently shows up and issues a demand to Brunhilde's colleagues the Defenders. The original Brunhilde-body is now in the witch's possession, and she wants the Valkyrie's fellow Defenders to find an item with which to ransom said body, since it is now the only receptacle that can house Brunhilde's liberated spirit. There's some paltry debate amongst the heroes about the morality of the transference, since it will possibly doom Barbara Norris' spirit, but some of the Defenders attempt to do the Enchantress' bidding. 

I'll pass over the specific treasure they seek, because it's irrelevant to the story as a whole. Slightly more interesting is Enchantress' motivation for wanting the treasure. Out of the blue, she decided one day to conjure up The Spirit of Love and incarnate the being (not seen in Marvel comics prior to this story) so that Enchantress, the consummate loose woman, can bond with the Spirit. Somehow, the aforementioned treasure will restore the villainess's "purity," which is a point De Matteis does not explore overmuch. 

The heroes assigned to get the magical thingie end up choosing not to deliver the goods. Thus Enchantress tries to slay Brunhilde's body, but the Defenders forestall her. Love, who hasn't said much about all these goings-on, suddenly announces that he doesn't love Enchantress's manipulations, and he not only deserts her, he takes the spirit of Barbara Norris with him for some sort of heavenly union. This makes it possible for Brunhilde's spirit to become incarnated in her rightful body, and then issue #109 is taken up with Valkyrie taking her vengeance on the sorceress.

I don't envy DeMatteis trying to make a story out of all the body-switching complications he inherited, and I get that it's tough to focus on the main conflict, the one between Valkyrie and Enchantress, given that DEFENDERS was a team book and the writer was expected to give the other members of the super-team some activities to keep them busy. But De Matteis seems to go out of his way to make the matter MORE complicated than necessary, as with shoehorning non-members Spider-Man and the Beast into the mix. I should note that Mark Gruenwald was credited with a "plot assist," probably because that writer finished (but did not start) the "Celestials Saga" in the pages of THOR a few years previous. In fact, the latter part of "Vengeance" is a complicated sorting-out of Valkyrie's interaction with her lord the All-Father Odin, and maybe Gruenwald's role was mainly filling DeMatteis in on all the continuity complications from the aforesaid saga. Speaking as a fan of Marvel continuity, I *did* want to see the relationship of Valkyrie and Enchantress defined, just as I wanted to see the one between Valkyrie and Odin sorted out. But I didn't want to see a bunch of sterile plot-points trotted out in a desultory manner.

Artist Don Perlin was totally out of his depth with this sort of multi-character epic. I'm not familiar with much of his Golden or Silver Age work, but he was competent with simple, single-character titles like Marvel's WEREWOLF BY NIGHT. It's astonishing that so limited an artist remained in place on DEFENDERS from 1980 to 1986, and I tend to assume that he kept the position because the title was perceived to be a dog, even though the book must have made enough money to avoid cancellation during those years. To be sure, Perlin's visuals got better with the DEFENDERS scripts of Peter Gillis, since those scripts were clearer and more straightforward than De Matteis's labored gobbledygook, and I even favorably reviewed one of the Gillis-Perlin collaborations here.